Parents ---
Did You Know?Parental Controls For Gaming Consoles
It’s difficult enough to keep up with all the technological advances much less with all the emotional changes your children may be going through these middle school years. There has been little mention in the press of a new feature available on three of the hottest games recently brought to market that give parents tools/help in guiding their children through their teen-age years. The new Nintendo Xbox 360, Wii, and Sony PlayStation3 (PS3) all have content-filtering software tools tucked into their control panels that give parents control over whether their children can chat online, play violent video games, or watch R-rated movies.
Many parents are unaware that all three of the games consoles are multimedia devices that allow users access to the Web. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 also have the ability to watch movies. Fortunately, they also include software that users can activate to block children from watching R-rated movies. All three devices have controls that can limit or block the ability to chat online. However, there has been little mention of these parental controls, which can automatically detect the rating for games or movies and let parents determine if the games in a certain category are available to their children.
On Each Console, Take Control
Sony PlayStation 3-- Owners can set different ratings thresholds for video games, DVD movies and high-definition "Blu-Ray" movie discs. These settings are locked in with a four-digit PIN code. The system digitally detects both ratings for movies and the separate ratings that video games are given by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. The ESRB ratings include "E" for everyone, "M" for mature (players 17 and older,) "T" for teens and "AO" for adults only. Use the master account (see “Security Settings”) to set up parental control settings for each of your children. You’ll need to set up sub accounts for the different members of your family with appropriate levels of access.
Nintendo Wii-- Owners can set a four digit PIN code that must be entered to play or download games with ratings such as "M" or "T." The Wii, with built-in wireless Internet access, also lets parents control whether their children can go online with the system or receive messages from other Wii owners. A website called GamerDad.com has information on how to set up parental control for Wii consoles and is easy to follow.
It's worth mentioning that the Wii keeps track daily of all the games that are played and how long they are played, which is very useful if you don't want to outright block games but you still want to check up on what your children are doing (or how long they are doing it). The information is posted to the message board - so if you go there and see data missing, you might want to talk to your child about why the information isn’t there.
Microsoft Xbox 360-- Microsoft has a website, Safety is No Game where parents can set their device so that it does not play movies or games with certain ratings. Parents also can control whether their kids are able to talk to people via the system's online "chat" features. Owners can adjust these settings via the Web or directly on the console.
If you have questions please email Ms. Chang at echang@pausd.org.
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Webmaster | updated 11/09